Google Chrome

I wrote recently we talked about Google’s own browser, Chrome. I said that we would look at Chrome after use for a few days to see how it performs.

Google is of course smart, and designed a browser that will help push it’s goals.  Google wants you to do more on the web. This means making the web faster, easier, and safer.

So here are some positives I’ve found with the browser after using it for a week.

• Google has the ability to put their name behind it. On the Internet, Google is king, and they can use their influence to push for certain standards.
• Chrome has been built with speed in mind. They have changed the way several core components work under the hood to be more optimized. This should allow for a smaller memory footprint and faster execution. After using running it for several days straight, it does not seem to slow like other browsers do, and it does appear from just watching it, that pages display faster and JavaScript runs faster. This is especially important if you use a lot of web based applications, such as Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs and more.
• Chrome is a standards based browser, which means that if it runs in Firefox, or especially Safari, it should run in Chrome.
• Chrome has been designed to be stronger in the security realm. Google is claiming that extra effort has been put into ensuring that Chrome’s risk to exploitation is lower than other browsers. This should reduce the potential security holes which allow viruses to attack and phishers to steal information.
• Google has the infrastructure to test the browser in ways others cannot. To test their new browser, they have looked at their search results and started tuning based upon which sites are most likely to be viewed by its users. I’ve had a few issues with a couple of sites, but I can count them on one hand.
• Chrome reduces crash risk. Every application can crash.  This is fact of computers. However, because of how Chrome was designed, if you run multiple tabs, and one crashes, it won’t take out the rest of your tabs.  So if you are working on an email, and another tab crashes, you don’t loose your email.

It’s one thing to look at your reports, its another to start to draw conclusions from your data. Different people will look at the data in different ways. Most often, the reports are looked at by the marketing department/person to see how to better market the site, what Search Engine optimization needs to occur, and measure the effectiveness of their pay-per-click ads. All of these are important uses of the web analytics, but they are not the only uses.

I want to look at a specific example of how I, as a web developer, recently went about making a site faster based upon the results of some analytics reports.

The 80/20 rule of the web

We’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule. On the web it would 80% of people only use 20% of your web site. In reality however, depending upon your site, it could be more like 90/10. A novice web developer will try to optimize all of the pages. An experienced web developer doesn’t bother with those pages that receive only the smallest amount of visitors.

On an Intranet web site I maintain, which tracks the employees’ internal education process, I was looking at the internal search feature. The search results are loaded into the same page. When you count the results from the searches, this page accounted for 24% of all of the page views, making it the second most visited page on the site. (The #1 page is mostly static text, so no real improvements could come from there.)

This means for every 2 people to visit the site, approximately 3 searches were performed in addition to the normal page load. So almost 1 out of every 4 page views was to this internal search engine, and some people were searching multiple times.

This became an area to consider improving. As a little improvement here, would have more effect than a large improvement on a page that is only viewed 1% or less of the time.

Too combat this, I decided to load the results in with AJAX instead of reloading the whole page. This process would improve search response in 3 ways.

Network Connections

Each time a file is downloaded over the Internet, the web browser checks to see if there is a newer version on the server, or if it can use a local file it has already downloaded (cached). Each time it checks to use a local version or downloads a new copy, the server is using up resources, and your end-user has to wait for the files to finish checking/downloading. Because the number of network connections has been reduced, other people can be accessing the site at a faster rate, and the end-user appears to be faster as they don’t have to have their computer do as much work.

The search page referenced 15 external files, plus itself. Of those 12 wouldn’t have to be called anymore. So I was able to reduce the number network connections by 80% for the search results. This was our biggest savings. The number of network connections on a web server is limited by both number and bandwidth speed, therefore the more connections, the slower each connection appears.

Processing of Files

Knowing in advance that it was going to be a popular page, I had tried to make the page as efficient as possible initially. However, with some of the features, like remembering the previous search criteria, because you never left the page, no longer needed, I was able to simplify the page.

The initial page load took about the same amount of time, however when the search results displayed, it appeared to be less than 1 hundredth of a second faster to process the file, about 4.45% faster. While individually it does not yield much savings, when applied as many times as it is with the popularity of the page, the savings adds up, especially during peak times.

Size of Results File Download

I knew I would save a lot in this area. The search interface, consisting of 6 controls, and a variety of other HTML sections, would no longer have to be duplicated in loading the results. This would mean faster downloads, and improved “perception” of the speed of the web page/server. Based on the same sample set of data, there was an 11K reduction in the overhead of the search results, or approximately 14% smaller download. This was for a search with over 100 results. However, many times fewer results (20-50) are returned. So the savings in bandwidth, while still approximately 11K, would be a much higher percentage (30-75%).

Final Thoughts

Because I could determine from our analytics package which files were being processed more, I was able to get the most bang for my buck. This update will take some load off the server, and allow all the pages to benefit from this enhancement. Likewise, almost every visitor will notice a performance improvement in the site because of how often this page is viewed.

This is how a web developer can effectively use web analytics to improve the performance of the web site.

Photo by: Sektordua Remember High School? Do you remember the Homecoming Dance, Class President, and Prom? Who won those events? If your school was like mine, it was the most popular boy and girl wearing the crowns/winning the office. In many ways, the web is like High School! Similar rules apply. The ok at how. This realization came to me while I was working with a local company to assist them in their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. In their industry, there are thousands of companies on the web. Typing in their company name alone will generate over 2 million pages returned in Google. Yahoo and other engines return similar numbers. So think of the web as a high school with billions of students, and within your industry is like the High School clicks, with millions of students/pages.

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